Samsung S Voice

~ the last words ~

Samsung announced S Voice on 3 May 2012 and shipped it on the Galaxy S III at the end of that month, six months after Apple had put Siri on the iPhone 4S. The timing explains the product. It set alarms and read the weather back to you, and you woke it either by saying Hi Galaxy or by double-tapping the home button, which is how most people met it, because most people double-tapped the home button by accident.

It was not Samsung technology. S Voice was Vlingo underneath, a Boston voice-assistant company that Nuance had bought in December 2011, and from the Galaxy S5 onward it ran on Nuance directly. Nuance also supplied the speech recognition behind Siri. At the layer that actually heard you, the two rival assistants of that generation were the same vendor.

Reviews were unkind at launch and never warmed up. It was slower than Siri and quicker to give up and hand you a web search. Samsung shipped it anyway across most of a decade of hardware: the Galaxy S line through the S7, the Note line through the Note 5, the mid-range A phones, the Tab tablets, the Galaxy Camera, and finally the Gear S3 and Gear Sport watches, where it mattered most because a watch is the one device on which typing really is worse than talking.

Bixby took over in 2017 with the Galaxy S8. S Voice then spent three years as a superseded assistant still installed on an enormous installed base of older handsets, still dialing home to a live server farm every time somebody's pocket pressed the button. Samsung posted the end-of-service notice on 11 April 2020.

~ the record ~

~ the language list ~

S Voice understood English, French, Spanish, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hindi and Luxembourgish. Turkish never made that list, in eight years of releases. Luxembourgish has something like four hundred thousand speakers. Turkish has eighty million, in a country where the Galaxy S line sold in volume and where Samsung ran the sort of advertising you could not walk past.

So the assistant was there in the settings and on the double-tap, and it did not speak the language of the person holding the phone. Switch the whole device to Turkish and the assistant stayed in English, waiting for an English sentence. That is a particular and very ordinary kind of not-for-you, and it is why S Voice is a name I recognize perfectly well without ever having had a reason to use it.

~ the accidental button ~

The double-tap-home shortcut was enabled by default and it fired constantly. Take a phone out of a pocket and S Voice would already be up with the microphone open, sending the noise of whatever room you were in to a server in Korea. For three or four years the most-searched piece of Galaxy advice was how to switch the thing off. An assistant whose top result is its own off switch has already lost the argument.

~ 1 june 2020 ~

The notice gave about seven weeks. There was nothing to migrate to, because Bixby did not run on the hardware S Voice was still living on, so a Galaxy S5 owner in 2020 got no upgrade path and no replacement. The app stayed installed and stopped answering. On the Gear S3 and Gear Sport, which had shipped with S Voice as the primary way of putting anything into them, the button remained where it was and did nothing at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »